Create a searchable form in Play Framework with Java

Question

I'm trying to create something similar to the below HTML form using Play framework with Java:

https://www.w3schools.com/howto/tryit.asp?filename=tryhow_js_filter_list

But instead of hard-coding the selectable values to be searched (like "Adele" in the example I gave above), I plan on querying a large dataset with thousands or 10s of thousands of records and allowing users to search that dataset. Please answer my below 2 questions:

1. Is this possible to do in the Play Framework
2. Would doing this be bad practice? Would it be better to have users enter a string and only query when they hit the 'Search' button?

Answer 1

1. This is 100% possible with Play! The bottleneck will be your dataset. Is it a file, an SQL database, a nosql database, a search engine, a webservice query. This is where the problem usually lies.

2. Debatable. Implement it any way you like, if you experience bottlenecks tweak it. You could implement a 200ms timeout before firing the ajax request. A very nice tool is select2 which allows you to easily configure this.